One Man's Freedom Fighter...

Wednesday 26 November 2008
Arambol Beach, Goa

Ah, paradise. Every few minutes walking around here I remind myself of why I wanted to come back to somewhere like this. And for the other guys too, they feel the same way. I can see why people keep on coming back.

I didn't do too much today. I bought a few things from the town, read my book, had a dip in the water. I took it fairly easy just so my stomach could get some rest. And if I wasn't a bit ill then I would probably be doing exactly the same thing. You'd want to in a place like this.

Evan randomly met up with a Kazakhstani girl who we had met briefly the previous night, and ended up disappearing for most of the day with her. She was a funny girl – beautiful, sexy, from Kazakhstan for crying out loud, here on here own, and seemingly keen to “party!” She didn't have much English and it looked like she was pretty well off. What could her story be? A poor little rich girl whose travelled all the way to Goa from Kazakhstan. The two obvious ones seemed to be gangster's moll or some high class stripper. She certainly danced like one. Were our prejudices getting in the way? I guess the philosophical concern is ... dammit, she's hot.

So fair play to him. In the evening we went to a restaurant where they were showing movies. We caught the end of Fellowship of the Ring, then the Jim Carrey vehicle Liar Liar, which actually is quite funny when you're drunk (probably the target audience). And then we heard the news.
Attacks in Mumbai. We went to another floor of the bar and watched the broadcast of an Indian 24 hour news channel. At this stage what was known was that there had been attacks on a number of locations in Bombay. There were four mentioned: Taj Mahal Hotel, Leopold's Café, Oberoi Hotel and Victoria Terminus. Apparently guys with machine guns had just run in to these places and sprayed machine guns at everyone. They were claiming 4 dead at this stage. It was crazy. Two days ago I was in two of those locations, and my hotel was in the same block as two of those locations. It was a damn near close run thing.